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sharply. ‘You believe what I’m saying, don’t you, Aisling? You don’t think I’m making all this up, you aren’t laughing at me, are you?’
    I replied without a flicker of a smile, ‘Oh, I believe you, Franca. I believe in evil all right, you needn’t worry on that score.’
    There had been times since then when I had thought that I would take myself along to Don Antonio. Would he get the shock of his life, if the pendulum started to loop the loop, or lift itself up, to float in the air, with the ribbon that held it dangling limply? What if I suddenly found myself gripped by one of those terrible spasms, with which I was sometimes afflicted, when I felt that deep anxiety, so that my stomach heaved, and this time, instead of bringing up my dinner, I brought up a real live devil, coming out like a perverted baby, leathery, black and as ugly as sin? I could imagine the reaction of Don Antonio, whom I would sometimes see praying complacently under the frescoes, in the dimness of the church. I thought of how shocked he would be to see the real thing, even after years of swinging pendulums and the odd turd-infested pillow. He would not be able to confront the sight with the same bland confidence of the medieval friar inthe painting, to whom such things were all in the course of a day’s work. Oh yes, I certainly believed in evil, and I couldn’t understand how anyone didn’t, all they had to do was to buy a newspaper to read about it in a thousand different forms. I knew there was evil in me.
    But I believed in goodness too, and I could also recognize it. Lucia was a good person, she was at peace with herself, and with the world, in a way I could only marvel at.
    Once, when I was teaching her, I asked her to describe in English a dream she’d had. She told me she had dreamt about swimming in a beautiful silvery sea, and around her there had been all sorts and sizes of coloured fish, gentle whales, iridescent weed. It was, she said, the happiest dream, it was so lovely to be there, and when she woke up she was still happy. Looking at her face as she told me this, I thought of the threat-filled nightmares that habitually tormented my sleep. I never had dreams like the one Lucia had just described.
    The money on the light meter had run out, and the church slipped abruptly into blackness again. Narrowing my eyes, I tried to see the man standing beside me.
    ‘The next time I go to Florence,’ I said to this stranger in a loud stage whisper, ‘can I come and visit you?’

4
    When I travelled away from S. Giorgio any further than about thirty kilometres, I used to take the train. It meant I could relax and look out at the landscape, and think about things. I don’t like driving in big cities, and it’s almost impossible to find a parking space in Italian towns. So although the train system isn’t the greatest, particularly on our line, I don’t think it’s as bad as many of the Italians used to make it out to be. They just prefer to travel by car, when at all possible. That’s another thing that’s not widely admitted about Italy. You’re told that the most abiding memories you’ll bring home are of the Trevi Fountain, or the sun setting over the bay of Naples; but it’s more likely to be the memory of being driven at every time you go out, of turning into a street and a car inevitably following you, so you stop and let it past and once that’s done, it’s quite likely to start reversing back towards you. It’s nothing personal, but you can begin to feel that it is when yet another car starts to do a three-point turn on the piece of road where you’re standing. The car, the television, chewing gum – they’re every bit as important in Italy as they are in America, but these modern obsessions can be hidden behind a screen of past culture, and they get away with it because not many people want to see contemporary Italy as it really is. But if you go to any of the smaller medieval hill towns like S.